Chapter 8: Dewey Anticipates Habermas’s Paradigm of Communication: The Critique of Individualism and the Basis for Moral Authority in Democracy and Education

This essay originally appeared in Brian W. Dotts, Dewey Anticipates Habermas’s Paradigm of Communication: The Critique of Individualism and the Basis for Moral Authority in Democratic Education, Education and Culture, 32.1, Article 9, pp. 111–129. This material appears courtesy of Purdue University Press. All rights reserved. http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/eandc/vol32/iss1/art9

The chapter presents a novel account of a key concept in John Dewey’s reconstructionist theory specifically related to the nucleus underlying his idea of democracy: intersubjective communication, what Dewey called the ‘democratic criterion’. Many theorists relate democracy to a form of rule. Consequently, discussions of democracy tend to be limited to functionalist theories. Dewey’s idea of democracy establishes an important distinction from conventional theories by developing its radical, critical, evolutionary, and intersubjective potential. I argue that Dewey anticipated Jürgen Habermas’s Paradigm of Communication in his reconstructionist social theory with potential to de-reify institutions and to empower human beings democratically.